Brotherhood VI: Initiation

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All Rise...

Judge David Johnson made it through his frat's initiation. All he had to do was eat a live Daschund.

The Charge

Prepare yourself for the rites.

Opening Statement

E1 and Here! team up to completely obliterate your valuable time with this
awful horror film.

Facts of the Case

The newest group of pledges from the Gamma Kappa fraternity arrived at a
cabin in the middle of nowhere to take part in their mandatory initiation,
which, for some reason, requires them to spend every waking moment in their
underwear (wouldn't the point of having them run around half-naked be to
embarrass them in front of other people and not squirrels?).

Little do they know, a crazed, masked lumberjack is ready to get his murder
on, stalking and killing whomever he runs into in the woods one by one with his
tiny axe. Eventually there's one guy left and he is absolutely defiant about
remaining in his underwear.

The Evidence

This is quite the debacle, a ridiculous outing from start to finish and
frankly shocking in its incompetence, seeing as we've been operating off of
proven game-plans for slashers-on-the-loose horror flicks for over 30 years.
Really, with such a wide genre catalog to look at and even crib from, how do the
brains behind Initiation manage to produce such a moronic
misadventure?

Here's how the film rolls out: the two frat leaders sit down and exchange
lengthy strings of plot exposition, cut to the pledges doing things in their
underwear like running through the woods and getting paddled, cut to the
lumberjack killing a victim, cut back to the frat leaders, and so on. The
formula receives a tweak toward the end, as the victims pile up and it's even
more nonsensical: the lone survivor (still in his briefs) runs through the
woods, cut to the lumberjack, cut to a series of flashbacks from like five
minutes ago.

That's right, director David DeCoteau has so little faith in the short term
memory retention of his audience that he feels compelled to rehash the same
footage of dead bodies and axe swings and lumberjack glares that we had just
seen minutes ago. And not just once. You'll be seeing the same multiple times,
to the point where you'll get a flashback for something that happened the scene
before!

As for the horror elements here, the less said the better, but I need to
crap out a couple of more paragraphs so here goes. The only blood you see on
screen literally is on-screen. When the lumberjack takes his axe-swipe and the
victim goes down, some cheap computer-generated splatter hits the TV. Aside from
a couple of stiffs with crusty red stuff dribbling down from their faces, that's
it for the gore.

In conclusion, this movie exists solely for getting dudes in their
underwear.

Closing Statement

The movie is garbage and the DVD—1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, 5.1
surround, and a commentary that is almost impossible to hear thanks to some poor
audio balancing—is mediocre. Give these brothers a wide, wide berth.